Philosophisches Tagebuch: Gedanken und Ideen, fremd und eigen

Lain

Oh, okay. So that’s how it works. I had no idea the world was this simple to figure out. I was overthinking things all along. I always thought the world was such a big scary place to live in, with no place to hide. But no. Once you figure it out, it’s all so easy.

If I had to invent a ridiculous term to encapsulate the unique experience that is Serial Experiments Lain, I would have to go with INTPorn.

No matter where you are, everyone is always connected.

Serial Experiments Lain is a psychedelic, post-modern cyberpunk series that one wonders how the director ever managed to make. Lain centers on a very shy school girl who slowly begins to figure out that she is not what she seems to be. After getting a computer and connecting to the “wired” […], Lain begins to realize that she may not be human, and that truly, reality and the “self” exists (or does not exist) on many different levels. As the story progresses, Lain “evolves” in terms of understanding what she is and her place in a very post-modern world. We also get many interesting side stories, including crime, teenage coming of age issues, and dastardly plots.

Many different and interesting philosophical ideas. But it is pure philosophical cyberpunk. Many key issues are discussed here, including:

The wired might actually be thought of as a highly advanced upper layer of the real world. In other words, physical reality is nothing but an illusion, a hologram of the information that flows to us through the wired. […] The physical body exists at a less evolved plane only to verify one’s existence in the universe.

This series not only opened my eyes…it literally changed my life. I’ve experienced the whole series many times, always letting it probe my mind to provoke thoughts I didn’t know existed. This isn’t a review, if you want to know what the series is like, watch it, or rather let it watch you. After studying the series for a while I became deeply interested in computers, computer science, philosophy, mind-expansion, and theory.

I related to Lain on such a personal level that the show almost seemed to transcend the subtext of it just being a work of fiction. But then again Serial Experiments Lain blurs the thin boundary that is reality and the virtual. The concepts and information shown at parts is very much worth looking into as well (E.I. Shuman resonance (commonly)7.83Hz). The integration into the story seems entirely possible in the future. The concept of the wired is in itself one of the most intriguing and glorious things i’ve ever heard of. Cyberpunk nirvana I suppose would be a way of looking at it. I could write for days on this work of art, but i’ll limit myself here. If you do decide to watch it, you must commit to the whole series, or you’ll probably be confused or misled. The series comes full circle like i’ve rarely seen any other do before.

The pacing of Lain is just strange. Lain is NOT an action fest, nor is it by any means straight forward. Lain starts out rather slowly and gets weirder every episode. Truly, the story is told in a very “traditional” post-modern fashion in that we have fragmented vignettes structured in a seemingly random non-linear manner. Lain uses disconnected visuals to continually barrage the viewer with different textures, color schemes, and sounds. Yet over time, it becomes clear that the story is being spunk in seemingly a cyclical fashion, almost as if we are exploring a large Mandelbrot by starting at an outside spiral and slowly working our way around to the big picture. Each fragmented vignette gets added to until, at the end, we have a rather expansive tapestry to explore.

For every event, there is first a prophecy for shadowing the event. An event first comes into existence when there is a prophecy.

If you really want to rid yourself of all suffering, you should believe that there is a God. Whether or not you truly believe that he exists, you can be sure that God is always by your side.

They say you can trace the origin of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus, all the way back to the Knights Templar. They’ve used that invisible human network, better known as the collective unconscious since long before the Wired ever came to existence.

On July 4th 1947, a strange aircraft crashed in the desert in New Mexico, America. The area was contained at once by government agents. What it actually was has yet to be proven conclusively. For now, conjecture has become fact, and rumor has become history.

Conducting sensory deprivation experiments using a variety of techniques such as Native American narcotics and isolation tanks to probe the depth of the human unconscious, John C. Lilly believed his experiments connected him to cosmic entities byway of a broad based communication network. Lilly dubbed the beings that were guiding him E.C.C.O. – Earth Coincidence Control Office. Soon afterwards, Lilly began work on communication with dolphins. These dolphins are incredible creatures which are able to conduct inerrable wide-range networking exercises via ultrasonic waves.

The Earth while orbiting the Sun has its own specific electromagnetic waves. Between the ionosphere on the Earth’s surface, there is a constant resonance at a frequency at 8Hz in the ELF band range of frequencies. This is called the Schumann Resonance. However, the extent of the effect on human subjects of these “Earth Brain Waves” that the planet constantly gives off is impossible to quantify and remains a mystery. The human population of the Earth is approaching that of the number of neurons in the brain. Douglas Rushkoff proposes that the consciousness of the Earth itself might be awakened when all humans on Earth become collectively networked and resonated at the same frequency. The evolution of the network would follow a neural model path. And just as neurons within the human brain are connected by synapses, the Earth itself would become a single neural network.